The Kennedy Assassination: 47 Years Later, What Do We Really Know?

By Jefferson Morley

Despite the enduring popularity of conspiracy theories about
President John F. Kennedy's death on November 22, 1963, it's a
mainstream consensus that these theories have always been essentially
the work of cranks,
popularized by a national appetite for mystery and entertainment. In
recent years, this consensus has been reinforced by Vincent Bugliosi's
massive, critically acclaimed book, Reclaiming
History, along with Tom
Hanks's related HBO special.

But for all the crazy ideas out
there, there remain sober and
careful alternative views of
the assassination. These theories may or may not ultimately be right,
but they represent the continuation of serious discussion of the
subject. As the debate continues past the 47th anniversary of President
Kennedy's death, let's take stock of five common myths about the state
of the debate itself.

1. The belief that secret plotters killed Kennedy was first made popular
by Oliver Stone's 1992 movie, JFK.

Popular belief in a
conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between
November 25 and 29, 1963, University of Chicago pollsters
asked more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for
the president's death. By then, the chief suspect, Oswald -- a leftist
who had lived for a time in Soviet Union -- had been shot dead while in
police custody by Jack Ruby, a local hoodlum with organized crime
connections.

While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas
Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent
of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved
in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought Oswald had acted alone.
Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of
respondents believing that there had been a plot. There were no JFK
conspiracy theories in print at that time. Oliver Stone was in high
school. 2. All serious historians believe that Lee Harvey Oswald
shot President Kennedy, alone and unaided.

Since 2000, five
tenured academic historians have published books on JFK's assassination.
Four of the five concluded that a conspiracy was behind the 35th
president's murder.

In a 2005 book, Breach
of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why,
Gerald McKnight of Hood College suggested that a high-level plot
involving senior U.S. intelligence officials was probably responsible
for the president's death. In his 2003 book about photographic evidence,
The
Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, David Wrone of the
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point argued that the famous amateur
film footage of the assassination proves that Kennedy was hit by gunfire
from two different directions. Wrone did not advocate a theory of who
was responsible.

The president's brother
Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed
by political enemies, according to historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim
Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One
Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they
reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to
Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton
carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi
Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link
between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis:
RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite
Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that
the president was felled by domestic opponents."

In the Senate,
Democrats Richard
Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of
Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination. In the
executive branch, Joseph
Califano, the General Counsel of Army in 1963 and later Secretary of
Health Education and Welfare, concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a
conspiracy.* In the White House, H.R.
Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon, wanted to
reopen the JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn't interested.

Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of the U.S. national security
agencies, as well. Col. L. Fletcher
Prouty, chief of Pentagon special operations in 1963 (and later an
adviser to Stone), believed that there had been a plot.

Winston Scott,
chief of the CIA's station in Mexico City at the time of Kennedy's
murder and an ultra-conservative Agency loyalist, rejected the Warren
Commission's findings about a trip that Oswald had taken to Mexico six
weeks before the assassination. Scott concluded in an unpublished memoir
that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.

None of these
figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a
cross section of the American power elite in 1963. Neither did they talk
about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it
only reservedly, in confined circles.

4. Former Los Angeles
County prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi refuted all JFK conspiracy theories
in Reclaiming History.

In the course of 1,600 pages Bugliosi effectively
refuted many unfounded conspiracy scenarios and reasserted the lone
gunman conclusions of the Warren Commission. But he has never engaged
the extensive scholarship of Commission skeptics such as journalist David
Talbot, historian Kaiser,
historian John
Newman, or biographer Anthony
Summers, or analyzed the innovative research of attorney William
Simpich.

Kaiser, author of seven books on U.S. history,
notes that Bugliosi's prosecutorial approach limits the scope of his
historical analysis: "He falls back on the old argument 'no one could
have ever used Ruby and Oswald in a conspiracy' which relieves him of
the necessity of addressing any of the conspiracy evidence seriously."

5. All the CIA's records related to the Kennedy assassination have been
made public.

The agency acknowledges that it currently holds
thousands of pages on Kennedy's murder that the public has never seen.
The CIA disclosed the existence of the still-secret JFK files while
responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed as it
happens by me, seeking the release of other records related to the
assassination.

In a sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, the CIA's
chief information officer, stated that the Agency has approximately
1,100 assassination-related documents that it plans to keep under wraps
until 2017, if not longer. These files -- containing more than 2,000
pages of material -- cannot be made public for reasons, Nelson says, of
national security.

In other words, somewhere in the Washington
metropolitan area there is a collection of CIA documents related to
JFK's murder that, if collated, would stand about ten inches tall. None
of those documents has ever been seen by the U.S. Congress or the National Archives, let
alone by journalists, historians, bloggers, Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, or
the general public.